S/PLI/T: How have your sketches and drawings influenced your practice?Dominique: When creating art, I instinctually gravitate toward drawing. I love it–drawing is a practice in paying attention, and it gives me a sense of focus and calm. I particularly like drawing from observation, and I think my marks are most compelling when I work from life. My style of observational drawing is gestural and ‘fast.’ I enjoy the immediacy and rough beauty of well-observed, economic mark-making. In school I took a wide range of art classes, but the area that got the most positive feedback was drawing. When you like something, you’re better at it. In college I began working with models: the chaotic changing of poses, charcoal mess everywhere, and flipping newsprint, I loved it! My gestural style paired well with the quick, timed poses. I was encouraged by my professors to draw everything like I drew the figure. I think that’s the main influence of my drawing style to the rest of my practice–an effort to try to capture the transience of a moving, or soon to move, figure. Even a posed figure is not posed forever- there is an immediacy to gestural figure drawing that I attempt to carry through to the rest of my work.

S/: Is there a connection between drawing bodies and drawing trees?D: Yes. Definitely. These tree drawings happened in my senior year. I needed to start a thesis project and had no idea where to begin–so I did what I love to do–sat outside and drew. Trees were all around, easy, and quite figural in their own tree-way. When I think back, it was a natural transition from drawing humans to drawing trees. They both have figural formal qualities, but trees don’t move around quite as much. The challenge became how to keep work gestural when drawing something static. What worked well in my figure drawing was my looseness and speed, and it’s difficult to keep that urgency when you’re drawing something that’s still. I ended up spending more time on each tree drawing, while still trying to focus on gesture. This additional time allowed me to build up depth and range of value that I couldn’t achieve in a quick 1–5 minute drawing. They ended up with a sort of layered, atmospheric quality and were a big reference point for my cyanotypes.

S/: We can definitely see a similar approach in the combination of value patches and distinct lines, and the all-over compositions.D: I actually ended up using this drawing for marks in one of my zinc plates, so they’re connected to the cyanotypes not only in the same atmospheric quality, but also directly through a process of photographic transfer. At the same time I was drawing these tree landscapes I began getting into printmaking, which started out pretty small–because it’s easier to print small, and it’s scary to print big. I made intaglio prints that involved the figure and the landscape, but I’m a messy artist so they ended up quite painterly. They have that same subject of gestural figures moving through space.

S/: So then after that, the cyanotypes came about. It’s so fun seeing these come about in your work over time, as the next step.D: Yes. I started getting experimental. The winter break before my Spring thesis show was due, the only work I did was taking pictures of people underwater. So I came back to school and was like this is what I got! Underwater people! I had a teacher who said I should probably try cyanotyping. So this is how it started out, one of my photographs, made into a negative, and cyanotyped directly. My photos were suddenly blue. I then had these cyanotype images and all of this momentum in printmaking. So I started combining the processes. But I was staying small, and it wasn’t really working out. The images were too small, too tight. Luckily I had a lot of giant zinc plates around, and could begin to go bigger.

S/: How many hours in the printshop?D: Many hours in the print shop, trying to figure out what was going on. Which is fun! I’m so glad to revisit this work because I remember being in that space of not having any idea of what I was doing or what the work was going to be. In Cyanotype photography you coat a paper in chemicals and then expose it to UV light to make a photograph. But in order to process your exposed image, you have to rinse your paper in water. You are literally dunking your paper in water watching these magical blue images appear. The water aspect ended up playing a big part in my work because that was also the subject matter–figures in water.

S/: That mirroring of the process in the subject matter is really interesting. How the subjects are underwater figures and to make it you literally have to put them underwater, again.D: Yeah! And to take the photos I had to go underwater. I had to go with an underwater camera and hold my breath, and be underwater.

S/: Tell us about the process for these works.D: It started out in the ocean by my parent’s house in Hawaii, I was taking pictures of people swimming and the coral ocean-scape. I got back to school in Colorado, and needed more photographs. With no ocean, I used the swimming pool and hot springs to photograph swimmers. I also started taking pictures of trees through the lens of water. I ended up with all these underwater digital photographs. To cyanotype, I would print the photograph onto a 8.5 x 11 transparency–essentially making film, and then make a contact print with the transparency and a paper soaked with cyanotype chemicals. At the same time I was making intaglio prints from those big zinc plates I had. These prints were made by the process of etching and monoprinting. Once the prints were ready I would coat them with cyanotype chemicals, put the negatives of my photographic images on top and expose the photographs onto the prints. Then came the great dunk of the print in water, and voila! The first print I made like this was a huge surprise, and feeling of hurrah! I knew I had discovered my process for this body of work. There were still lots of little discoveries along the way after that. The ink I was using to print was oil-based, so it resisted the cyanotype chemicals. The resistance would cause really interesting textures that recall the textures of water. I also found that I could paint the chemicals to get brush marks. I started using these accidents intentionally.Like the tape marks: I was taping my transparencies onto the prints to get them to stay put, and the tape marks were getting exposed in the process. At first I didn’t like them at all, I thought I would obviously crop them out. But after a couple of critiques and a great mental struggle, I let go of my need to make the perfect print. I ended up keeping the tape, and now love those marks, because they add to the complexity of the piece. A lot of the process shows up in the prints, which I love because these prints have such a long, intense process.

S/: It seems like you’re very interested in the process, as a record of actions on material over time.D: Way interested. That’s the fun part for me. My experience of getting lost in this process allowed for something to happen that I would never plan, or visualize, but came together in its own way.

S/: Your experience of the process is kind of similar to the disorienting feeling of being underwater, like the feeling of being submerged. D: Yeah! And it seems that the processes I chose connect to the subject matter even though that wasn’t a conscious decision.

S/: How would you describe the subject matter of these?D: The experience of submersion.

S/: Do you see that experience and these prints as having strong emotional content?D: You know–yes, the prints do seem to hold emotional content. It might have to do with identifying with these strange, obscured, submerged figures and atmospheres. Underwater submersion is a very unique state: you’re holding your breath, hearing is different, seeing is different, you’re floating. All of your external stimuli are processed differently, they’re muted. It is a state that, for me, is simplified and insular. A lot of the business above water is removed and you are insulated and floating and it’s magical. Almost mystical. The experience of submersion is found in other aspects of life too–the state of flow, overwhelming experiences, connection with people. A lot of highly emotional experiences can have a sense of submersion. So yes–I think these prints can be quite emotional.

S/: There’s also an element of danger underwater. One image in particular looks more violent, or uncomfortable, or like something is wrong. Another seems more ethereal, more Zen. D: I think the process really plays into those feelings. For the swimmer when they are underwater, there are moments of holding your breath when in the beginning you’re fine, you’re floating, and then there’s a point where you need to go get a breath, and there is a struggle. The photographs capture different points in the swimmer’s time underwater–different experiences of submersion. Swimming is not always floating bliss, it is also the uncomfortable struggle for air.

S/: These cyanotypes have so many different emotions. That one’s more hopeful. And this one is more sexual, like these two figures are connecting.D: Yes, when you use the figure it’s impossible to not have emotion connected. I know when I view art, I identify with the depicted figures, can’t help it. So these figures in these different sort of poses and atmospheres recall different emotions. The thing about photographing people underwater is they are always in motion. You can’t be in water and be perfectly still. The body is able to make shapes that it doesn’t make on land. The shapes connect and interact in ways that are quite interesting and dramatic–the shapes of the figures can also be quite vulnerable. Originally I was attracted to those formal aspects of the figure, and less of the emotional connotation, but you can’t make art with a figure and not have emotion. I don’t go after emotion when I’m making these, it seems to emerge later with the finished piece. It surprises me, too. It’s refreshing to make something–to be so focused on the process, and find in the end that you’ve made something outside of yourself, more than you had even intended.

S/: Yes! Something outside of you. One last question: In this series you use all women–why is that, and how do you view your relationship to the women, and the women’s relationship to the water?D: I was photographing people that were willing to be photographed, my lady friends! I don’t know what that says about ladies, but MAYBE THEY’RE REALLY GOOD FRIENDS. (laughter)

I think initially it was convenience, and who was available to work with me. I think it also says something about me, too, that I was more comfortable photographing women. It just felt more open. It’s kind of a strange thing to ask anyone to do, to go underwater over and over and over and over again to be photographed. Honestly it wasn’t super intentional because I wasn’t interested in saying something about the female body specifically. It wasn’t really a matter of choosing women over men, I just wanted a human figure. Even though I used female models, I like that some of the figures look male, and some are more androgynous. There is more freedom for the viewer to interpret. In some of them you can’t even tell there’s a figure. I want both men and women to be able to connect to the figures.

S/: Yes, it’s so interesting how the separation between human and water is very ambiguous in some of these, it makes us think about the conceptual separation between ourselves and our environment.Yes! That’s a great interpretation. The prints do depict a sort of merging of human and environment. That’s a concept I’d like to explore more: I want to inspire a realization of the connection humans have to the natural world. That relationship is very important and complex. Definitely a focus in my new work. Next print series: positive human-nature relationships–that’s the goal!